The Sidney Awards

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/opinion/brooks-sidney-awards-2019.html

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I’ve been giving out the Sidney Awards (initially called the Hookies) for long-form essays since 2004, in honor of the late great philosopher Sidney Hook. This year there were more phenomenal articles than ever before, many more than I can list. The topics they tackled were also more downbeat than ever before. It’s been that kind of year.

Several of the people who sent me their own lists of favorites suggested Candace Vogler’s essay “A Spiritual Autobiography,” in Comment. It’s unlike any essay you’ve ever read. Vogler suffered a childhood of unimaginable sexual abuse and neglect. “I was afraid to be alone. I was afraid of the other children in school. I was afraid of the other children in the neighborhood. I feared that an evil thing had attached itself to me, and could injure anyone who got close to me.”

Her life took a series of improbable turns: Berkeley feminism, Quakerism, a range of gay friends in society high and low, family disruption, bar fights, an Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice called Umbanda. From Jesus she learned that not all men are toxic. She is now an esteemed philosopher at the University of Chicago. You can’t summarize this essay because it’s so hard to encapsulate this life’s twists and turns. “I enjoy a kind of peace now that I could not have imagined before. I am the luckiest person I know,” Vogler writes, reflecting on the arrival of many graces into her life.

I’ve co-taught with her a couple of times (she’s an amazing teacher) and had no idea of the back story that she carries around — a reminder that many people we meet carry back stories that are simply mind-boggling.

In “When the Culture War Comes for the Kids,” in The Atlantic, George Packer describes what happens when the ferociously competitive meritocratic culture of the New York educated class collides with the ferocious social justice warrioring of the New York educated class. Packer traces his own family’s perilous adventure through a few Brooklyn schools and writes a piece that captures the zeitgeist of our age.

His son’s public school coerced parents into opting out of standardized tests and made the bathrooms gender neutral, leading female students to hold their bladder all day rather than go to the bathroom with boys. It taught the oppression of every out-group but never the history of the American founding. It’s not the school’s decisions themselves that are so remarkable but the atmosphere of P.C. religious zealotry that surrounds them, and the anguish of progressive parents who have to send their precious children into the maw of ideological re-education camps that in theory they agree with.

In “The Unthinkable Has Happened,” in Vulture, Jayson Greene describes what happened when a brick fell from an eighth-floor windowsill and hit his daughter in the head. It’s a father’s wrenching and beautiful minute-by-minute account of the next few days. At one point he and his wife are in the hospital absorbing the doctor’s prognosis: “We know Greta is going to die, all of us, although we haven’t allowed the thought into our conscious minds yet. None of us is ready for it to maraud through our subconscious, killing and burning everything it sees. But we hear banging at the gates. We glance around us, realizing this is the last we’ll ever see of the world as we’ve known it. Whatever comes next will raze everything to the ground.” You will read it and cry and hug your children tighter.

I’ve always given Sidneys to individual essays, but this year it seems right to give one to an entire issue of a magazine, the December issue of The Atlantic, titled “How to Stop a Civil War.” That issue felt like a civic act. I’d particularly recommend Yoni Appelbaum’s essay, “How America Ends,” which captures the political moment we are in. America is undergoing a demographic revolution, with the dominant white majority becoming a minority. We’re also at a moment when hyperpartisans fear that losing an election will be more catastrophic than losing our democracy. Such people are willing to destroy democratic norms to stay in power (look around you). Appelbaum also argues that the key to the country’s future is building a healthy center-right. As someone who’s worked on this problem for 25 years, I say good luck with that.

I’d also recommend Caitlin Flanagan’s “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” from that issue. Flanagan does something that should be more common: She takes the most vivid arguments from each side of a controversy and she jams them into one essay. The most vivid argument of the pro-choice side is the back-alley and other dangerous abortions that result when you make the procedure illegal and the women who die as a result. Flanagan takes you there.

The most vivid argument of the pro-life side is the sonogram, and the growing evidence that cognitive life begins sooner than we thought. These images, Flanagan writes, “are proof that what grows within a pregnant woman’s body is a human being, living and unfolding according to a timetable that has existed as long as we have. Obviously, it would take a profound act of violence to remove him from his quiet world and destroy him.” There’s a reason this debate is so hard.

On a lighter note, Sports Illustrated had an essay by Emma Baccellieri, called “Mud Maker: The Man Behind MLB’s Essential Secret Sauce.” In 1920, the Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was killed when a pitch hit him in the head. Baseball needed a way to help pitchers have greater control of their pitches. The solution was to coat the balls with a thin layer of mud, thus improving their grip.

Jim Bintliff is the man who collects that mud, with shovels and buckets, from a secret spot along the Delaware River. His mud now coats roughly 240,000 balls per season. The story is about Bintliff, who cultivates the mud as if it were fine wine. “I know the mud. I’m the only one on the planet who does,” he says.

In “The Day the Dinosaurs Died,” in The New Yorker, Douglas Preston describes what happened when an asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago, the most significant event in the history of our planet. Twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris were thrown up into the atmosphere. The energy released was more powerful than a billion Hiroshima bombs. A mountain rose up higher than Mount Everest. Fires consumed 70 percent of the world’s forests and killed 99.9999 percent of all living organisms. Preston’s tale gets more astounding from there.

In “Magic Eraser Juice,” in Hazlitt, Elizabeth Rosen describes what it’s like to be an E.M.T. in the age of the opioid epidemic. The piece is gripping throughout but especially when she’s describing how people who have overdosed are brought back to life when she administers Narcan. Some are overcome with grief that they have fallen so low. Others are nonchalant: “Oh, I’ve OD’d a bunch of times.”

I hope everybody has read Richard Powers’s phenomenal novel “The Overstory,” about how trees communicate (and a lot more). Robert Macfarlane’s essay “The Understory,” in Emergence Magazine, is even more astounding, explaining how trees communicate underground. One of the ways they do it is through hyphae, which are superfine threads that fungi send out through the soil to create an interconnected social network. A single teaspoonful of soil can hold up to seven miles of hyphae.

I found the American Scholar essay “How I Learned to Talk,” by Emily Fox Gordon, a pure delight. When she was a young woman, Gordon found a psychoanalyst, Leslie Farber, who didn’t try to force epiphanies and breakthrough “Aha!” moments. He didn’t treat therapy as work. He saw it as an occasion for friendship and beautiful talk. This kind of talk, Gordon writes, “is playful and gratuitous. Though it often contains elements of argument and analysis, its first aim is not to solve problems. In the case of Farber’s practice, any therapeutic benefit lay in the talk itself, the self-forgetting human connection that can lift a person out of desperate isolation and remind him that in the future such reprieves will continue to be possible.” Gordon’s narrative voice is lovely and wise. Farber is someone we would all like to have known — and can through this essay.

The final Sidney winner is a bit of a cheat. “Cop Diary” by Edward Conlon was first published in The New Yorker in 1997 and was reposted this year by The Sun. It’s certainly the most realistic description of police work that I have read. “I take prisoners,” Conlon writes, “and to exercise that authority is to invoke a profound social trust. Each time a surgeon undertakes the responsibility of cutting open a human being, it should be awesome and new, no matter how necessary the operation, no matter how routine. A police officer who takes away someone’s freedom bears a burden of at least equal gravity. Let me tell you, it’s a pleasure sometimes.”

When I read these essays at the end of the year, I feel like I’ve been given gifts and a deeper appreciation of the reality around us. When I spend the rest of the year following impeachment on Twitter, not so much.

A lot of people help me find great essays each year, but I’m especially grateful to Robert Cottrell, who runs one of my favorite spots on the web, The Browser; Conor Friedersdorf, whose The Best in Journalism newsletter is a weekly dose of intellectual nutrition; and Robert Atwan, who runs The Best American Essays series at Houghton Mifflin. All three are generous with their time and erudition. Full Disclosure: My wife is editor in chief of Comment, where the Vogler essay appeared.

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